Archives for December, 2008

Seabirds are undeniably cool. They often look neat, they often have very cool names (witness such examples as Macronectes, Oceanodroma and Cerorhinca), and their biology is often amazing. They include some of the largest and longest-lived of birds, the most numerous (there might be over 50 million Wilson’s storm-petrels Oceanites oceanicus in the world), and…

One of the lamest things people do on blogs is (in my humble opinion) write about their own blogroll. I mean: how banal, vapid and insipid can you be? Anyway, on an unrelated note, observant readers will note… that I’ve just updated my blogroll – hooray! – and have added a brand-spanking-new and extremely exciting…

Over the course of my research career I have, like so many scientists, accrued a ridiculous list of ‘semi-complete’, ‘near-complete’ and ‘essentially complete’ research projects, all of which are sitting there, awaiting that extra investment of time and effort required to get them to the submission stage. A colleague recently accused me of being a…

Here’s the Tet Zoo Christmas card. As always, it’s strikingly Christmassy in theme and content (for 2007 go here and for 2006 go here). What does it all mean? Why, you’re a Tet Zoo reader: you don’t need to ask that! After all, you already realise the significance of qilins, cadborosaurs and Tecolutla monsters. Tizhureks…

Welcome to my final set of musing and recollections about our recent Moroccan trip, led by Nizar Ibrahim. Mostly I’ll be talking here about the amazing desert birds we got to see, but I also have stuff to say about the mammals, and – of course – about the fossils…

Here’s a picture I left on a wall at the edge of the Sahara… It wasn’t random graffiti: we stayed at an auberge where there was a long tradition of this sort of thing. And if you need a close-up of the little figures on the left…

More musings from the Morocco trip. So, we travelled over the Atlas Mountains and were soon up at the snowline. We joked about seeing lions and bears, but did see a Barbary partridge Alectoris barbara (another first) and a representative of the strikingly blue Blue tit subspecies Cyanistes caeruleus ultramarinus. If you’ve been keeping up…

Several weeks ago, I and a group of colleagues from the University of Portsmouth (Dave Martill, Robert Loveridge and Richard Hing) set off on a trip to the Cretaceous exposures of Morocco. We were to be joined by Nizar Ibrahim from University College Dublin – our team leader – and by Samir Zouhri and Lahssen…

Since getting back from Morocco I’ve had no time to do anything for the blog, dammit. Too much to catch up on. But stuff is coming. Meanwhile, here are some interesting pictures. They depict the same sort of creature, but what is it? I know, I know: easy.

Over the past month Tet Zoo has been totally different. In what way has it been “totally different“, I hear you ask. The answer: I have been absent, with all of the posts having been scheduled in advance of my departure. Many thanks to everyone for reading stuff and for leaving comments in my absence.…